Leads - Proactive Guide to Sales Leadership, Part 1
Leads - Proactive Guide to Sales Leadership, Part 1
First up in this series on optimizing Salesforce for your Sales and Services team is the topic of lead generation and qualification. With a focus on education service providers impacted by the rapid introduction of distance learning due to corona virus, this topic applies to all business and sales leaders.
In many companies, lead generation and qualification is a dance between Marketing and Sales. In a well-run lead process, marketing is a true partner in this dance. They run effective campaigns, use automation tools and data to warm up and qualify leads for your sales team. Your sales people can easily determine which leads are most worth pursuing, letting them use their time efficiently and reducing the overall cost of sale. In the ideal state, the dance is well-coordinated, timed and beautifully executed.
However, Sales leaders know this isn’t the reality in all companies - quite often the “Leads dance” is a bit clumsy, off-beat and maybe a little hard to watch. In many markets, including Education, sales leaders greatly rely on relationship-based selling techniques, and historically got away with a lack of a good marketing partnership because of their relationships with customers. However, in the post-Covid world, it may be awhile before you can meet up for coffee or shake hands with district leaders again. In this world, it’s more important than ever to build a partnership with marketing, and have well-integrated tools and processes in place to generate, manage and qualify leads.
In our experience, there are four key parts to consider when evaluating your systems and processes for Sales and Marketing. Do these four items exist at your company? These build on each other, and hint at the maturity of your lead process and state of the Sales-Marketing partnership. If the answer is no, or not all, your sales team is likely working too hard on cold, unqualified leads, resulting in a high cost of sale and a poor ROI on marketing initiatives - a losing situation for both sides.
Marketing is effectively using automation tools and drip campaigns to nurture and qualify leads for the Sales team.
Marketing tools, including website, email, social and analytics, are integrated with Salesforce, or another CRM tool, so data on leads is accurate, rich, and up to date. Sales reps know which leads are most likely to convert.
Leads are getting a quick response, that same day, with additional opportunities to interact with your brand.
Return on investment (ROI) on marketing campaigns is measurable, and used to adjust strategies and methods to maximize your impact.
If you can’t do these things today, it’s time to invest in ways that improve your systems, integrations and relationships. In the changing landscape due to Covid-19, real-time data, lead automation, and integrated communication have gone from nice-to-haves to must-haves. Our team at Level Up CRM can help you make quick, high impact system updates, and provide the coaching and expertise to align your people and processes.